Since 9/11, President Bush's repeated assaults on the
Constitution and celebration of international lawlessness ...
have needlessly made Americans less safe. The president, for
example, has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
in intercepting the conversations and e-mails of American
citizens on American soil on his say-so alone. He has claimed
authority to break into and enter our homes, open our mail and
commit torture. He has insisted that the entire United States is
a battlefield -- even pizza parlors -- where lethal military
force may be employed to kill ... suspects with bombs or
missiles. He has detained citizens and noncitizens alike as
enemy combatants based on secret evidence. And he has insisted
that he is constitutionally empowered to keep U.S. troops in
Iraq indefinitely. Congress should restore the Constitution's
checks and balances and protections against government abuses.
The most frightening of Bush's abuses travels under the banner
of "extraordinary rendition." In its name, Bush has kidnapped,
secretly imprisoned, and tortured. The practice is what would be
expected of dictators such as the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin
or Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The detainees are held incommunicado
without accusation or trial. No judge reviews the allegedly
incriminating evidence. No law restricts interrogation methods
or the conditions of confinement. And the innocent are left
without recourse as "collateral damage" in Bush's ... global
[war on terrorism].

Note: The author, Bruce Fein, served as Associate Attorney
General under President Reagan.

Below are one-paragraph excerpts of important news articles you
may have missed. These news articles include revealing
information on sweeping surveillance by the National Security
Agency (N.S.A.), the politicization of government science, U.S.
arms sales to the Middle East, and more. Each excerpt is taken
verbatim from the major media website listed at the link
provided. If any link fails to function, click here. Key
sentences are highlighted for those with limited time. By
choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and
will build a brighter future.

With best wishes,
Tod Fletcher and Fred Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info
Team

The Bush administration's chief intelligence official said
yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret
surveillance activities under a single executive order in late
2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National
Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation
than the president previously described. The disclosure by Mike
McConnell [is] the first time that the administration has
publicly acknowledged that Bush's order included undisclosed
activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and
phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005. McConnell
[disclosed] that the executive order following the Sept. 11,
2001 attacks included "a number of . . . intelligence
activities" and that a name routinely used by the administration
-- the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- applied only to "one
particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more. This is
the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed
publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various
activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged."
News reports ... have detailed a range of activities linked to
the program, including the use of data mining to identify
surveillance targets and the participation of telecommunication
companies in turning over millions of phone records. Kate Martin
... of the Center for National Security Studies, said the new
disclosures show that ... administration officials have
"repeatedly misled the Congress and the American public" about
the extent of NSA surveillance efforts. "They have repeatedly
tried to give the false impression that the surveillance was
narrow and justified," Martin said. "Why did it take accusations
of perjury before the DNI disclosed that there is indeed other,
presumably broader and more questionable, surveillance?"

The Bush administration is pressing Congress this week for the
authority to intercept, without a court order, any international
phone call or e-mail between a surveillance target outside the
United States and any person in the United States. It would also
give the attorney general sole authority to order the
interception of communications for up to one year as long as he
certifies that the surveillance is directed at a person outside
the United States. Civil liberties and privacy groups have
denounced the administration's proposal, which they say would
effectively allow the National Security Agency to revive a
warrantless surveillance program conducted in secret from 2001
until late 2005. They say it would also give the government
authority to force carriers to turn over any international
communications into and out of the United States without a court
order. An unstated facet of the program is that anyone the
foreigner is calling inside the United States, as long as that
person is not the primary target, would also be wiretapped.
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington
legislative office [said], "What the administration is really
going after is the Americans. Even if the primary target is
overseas, they want to be able to wiretap Americans without a
warrant." The proposal would also allow the NSA to ... have
access to the entire stream of communications without the phone
company sorting, said Kate Martin, director of the Center for
National Security Studies. "It's a 'trust us' system," she said.
"Give us access and trust us."

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to
help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public
by a Bush political appointee without any background or
expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the
report did not promote the administration's policy
accomplishments. The report described the link between poverty
and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat
widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and
called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the
countries where they operate. Its publication was blocked by
William Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of
Latin American history whose family has long ties to President
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run
the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health
and Human Services. Richard Carmona, who commissioned the "Call
to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general
from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example
of the Bush administration's frequent efforts during his tenure
to give scientific documents a political twist. Carmona told
lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was
"called in and again admonished ... via a senior official who
said, 'You don't get it. This will be a political document, or
it will not be released.' " A few days before the end of his
term as the nation's senior medical officer, he was abruptly
told he would not be reappointed.

The Bush administration will ask Congress to expand
multibillion-dollar aid and weapons sales packages to friendly
nations in the Middle East. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
will announce proposed extensions and enlargements of foreign
aid to Israel and Egypt, and a proposed arms sales package to
Persian Gulf nations including Saudi Arabia. The Israeli and
Egyptian proposals would lock in U.S. commitments for the next
10 years. The total for Israel would rise from $2.4 billion to
about $3 billion a year, and Egypt would continue to receive
$1.3 billion a year. The Bush administration also wants Congress
to give their stamp of approval to an arms sale package for
Saudi Arabia. Overall, the aid and arms packages would total $20
billion ... which is double what officials first estimated when
details first became public this past spring. Terrorism expert
Sajjan Gohel says the Saudi arms sale might not be a good idea.
"It shows that the Bush administration isn't looking really at
the long-term, but seems to be ... concerned about trying to
secure oil reserves and deposits in Saudi Arabia," Gohel said.

Note: For decades Israel, with a population now of just over 7
million, has been receiving U.S. tax dollars to the tune of over
$300 per year for every man, woman, and child? The new proposal
will increase that to over $400. This is more than 10 times what
any other nation receives per capita. And what results has all
of this aid brought? Click here for a 2002 Christian Science
Monitor article which starts off "Since 1973, Israel has cost
the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's
population, that is more than $5,700 per person."

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break
through the security of virtually every model of California's
voting machines and change results or take control of some of
the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of
California study. The researchers "were able to bypass physical
and software security in every machine they tested,'' said
Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to
bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.
Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly
how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers. The
review included voting equipment from every company approved for
use in the state. Bowen said ... that the report is only one
piece of information she will use to decide which voting systems
are secure enough to use in February's presidential primary
election.

Note: For more reliable, verifiable information on the problems
with new electronic voting machines, click here.

One of the largest American contractors working in Iraq, Bechtel
National, met its original objectives on fewer than half of the
projects it received as part of a $1.8 billion reconstruction
contract, while most of the rest were canceled, reduced in scope
or never completed as designed. But the report, by the Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent
agency, places a large share of the blame for the failures on
the government overseers at the United States Agency for
International Development who administered the contract. [USAID]
assigned just two people in Iraq to oversee the giant contract,
which included some 24 major projects and 150 subcontractors and
stipulated that all invoices be approved or denied in just 10
days. The report is the first of a planned series of audits of
Western contractors that have received large slices of the
roughly $40 billion in American taxpayer money that has been
spent on the troubled program to rebuild Iraq. Stuart Bowen Jr.,
who heads the special inspector general's office, said the
United States government clearly shared responsibility with the
company for the project failures. "I would say there's fault on
both sides," Bowen said in an interview Wednesday. He added that
neither the aid agency nor the United States Army Corps of
Engineers, which also oversaw aspects of the contract, ever came
close to filling all their staff positions in Iraq. "This isn't
so much an indictment of Bechtel as it is a criticism of the
system," said Stephen Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for
Common Sense in Washington.

Two years into a fraud investigation, veteran federal prosecutor
David Maguire told colleagues he'd uncovered one of the biggest
cases of his career. Maguire described crimes "far worse" than
those of Arthur Andersen, the accounting giant that collapsed in
the wake of the Enron scandal. Among those in his sights:
executives from a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, the
investment empire overseen by billionaire Warren Buffett. In May
2006, he felt strongly enough about his case that he prepared a
draft indictment accusing executives from a Virginia insurer,
Reciprocal of America, of concocting a series of secret deals to
hide its losses from regulators. Although he didn't name anyone
from Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiary, he described the company
as a participant in the scheme. But Maguire never brought those
charges. Months after preparing the draft, he was removed as the
lead prosecutor on the case and reassigned. His replacement, a
prosecutor who hadn't been involved in the case until then, soon
announced that the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, General
Reinsurance, would not be indicted. By April of this year, the
entire investigation ... had fizzled. Former employees and
policyholders of the Richmond-based insurer were astounded. Why
had the Justice Department spent upward of $2 million to
investigate the case only to decline to prosecute? Maguire and
his team of investigators had secured two related guilty pleas,
interviewed dozens of witnesses and gathered 7,000 boxes of
documents. Tom Gober, a certified fraud examiner who worked on
the case ... concluded that the Justice Department had buckled
under pressure from defense lawyers. "It just stinks," he said.
"You don't come in out of nowhere and in no time kill three
years of sophisticated effort."

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted
little notice itself until a year ago, when two of its employees
had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas
embedded in their forearms. The "chipping" of two workers with
RFIDs radio frequency identification tags ... was merely a way
of restricting access to ... sensitive data and images ... the
company said. Innocuous? Maybe. But the news that Americans had,
for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to
perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of
ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to
erode privacy in the digital age. To some, the ... notion of
tagging people was Orwellian. Chipping, these critics said,
might start with Alzheimer's patients or Army Rangers, but would
eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex
offenders, then illegal aliens until one day, a majority of
Americans, falling into one category or another, would find
themselves electronically tagged. "It was scary that a
government contractor that specialized in putting surveillance
cameras on city streets was the first to incorporate this
technology in the workplace," says Liz McIntyre, co-author of
Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track
Your Every Move w